Report: Twitter profitable thanks to Microsoft, Google

Twitter may have its first profitable year thanks to search partnerships with Microsoft and Google, reports Bloomberg News.

A deal with Microsoft Bing, in which tweets are made searchable, will earn Twitter about $10 million, sources told Bloomberg. A similar deal with Google will generate about $15 million, bringing Twitter’s revenue from the deals to about $25 million.

The San Francisco-based company is expected to have $20 million to $25 million in operating costs for 2009, suggesting the search deals could push Twitter into profitability for the first time since its launch in 2006. Twitter, which employs about 105 people, didn’t focus on finances until this year.

Both Microsoft and Google announced their partnerships with Twitter on the same day in October, though Microsoft beat Google to the punch by a few hours.

Bing offers a potentially better way to search tweets than Twitter’s own search feature, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, told seattlepi.com in October. Twitter’s internal search, for instance, is slow and often goes down. Plus, the results are difficult to navigate.

But it’s about more than just offering an easier way to search tweets. It’s about Twitter’s vast, consumer-produced wealth of real-time data.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products and User Experience, wrote in October. “That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Twitter, Microsoft and Google were not commenting on the microblogging company’s potential profitability from the search deals. Read the entire Bloomberg report here.